The Wall Street Journal reports today, “Senate Republicans blocked law professor Goodwin Liu’s appointment to a federal appeals court Thursday, when Democrats fell eight votes short of the 60 needed to end a filibuster. Mr. Liu, whom liberal legal scholars saw as a rising star, proved more contentious than even President Barack Obama’s Supreme Court nominees, as conservative groups mobilized to keep the Rhodes Scholar from joining the San Francisco-based Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. . . . In a floor speech, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R., Ky.) called Mr. Liu ‘a left-wing ideologue who views the role of a judge not as that of an impartial arbiter, but as someone who views the bench as a position of power.’ . . . The Liu nomination became an ideological flash point because, unlike most Obama nominees, the University of California, Berkeley professor has visibly campaigned to revive liberal approaches to jurisprudence, which have been under conservative assault since the Nixon administration.”

Writing at The Heritage Foundation’s Foundry blog, Hans von Spakovsky explained why Liu should not have been confirmed as a federal judge: “Liu had no courtroom experience and has spent almost his entire career at the Berkeley School of Law in California. He had dismissed a textual reading of the Constitution, saying that the judicial function properly seeks ‘an awareness of the evolving norms and social understandings of our country’ and that a judge should act ‘as a culturally situated interpreter of social meaning.’ . . . There simply is no question that, based on his record, he would have been a liberal activist judge who would have done untold damage to the Constitution and the rule of law if he had been confirmed to lifetime tenure on the federal bench. In fact, hard as it is to imagine, Liu would have pulled the Ninth Circuit to the left, despite the fact that it is already the most liberal (and out of control) court of appeals in the nation – almost 90 percent of its cases are overturned by the Supreme Court on appeal.”

As Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell told Hugh Hewitt on his radio show last night, “I think the reason for it is quite clear. He had the view that it’s perfectly permissible, and even desirable for judges to kind of make it up as they go, in other words, to act as legislators. It probably didn’t help him any that he testified against both Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Alito, and used some rather strident language in describing both of them. But I think the core reason he was denied a vote, and therefore defeated, was because he seemed to be uninterested in what the Constitution, or even the case law, might require a judge to do, and really, pretty openly, said he believed in judges ought to do whatever they think is the right thing to do.”

Tom is a US Navy Veteran, owns an Insurance Agency and is currently an IT Manager for a Virginia Distributor. He has been published in American Thinker, currently writes for the Richmond Examiner as well as Virginia Right! Blog.Tom lives in Hanover County, Va and is involved in politics at every level and is a Recovering Republican who has finally had enough of the War on Conservatives in progress with the Leadership of the GOP on a National Level.